Is women's sport shadowed in the UK and in real life?
This post was written by a student. It has not been fact checked or edited.
If I were to ask you to name a famous sports person that you think a room of two hundred people would all know, would you say a male or female's name? I guarantee that most would say a male's name, even if it were a female's that came first to mind, and this is all because of a little thing called advertisement and promotion. Both of which show that people would rather settle for what's right in front of them as it's easier to fit into "societal norms", rather than trying something new and arguably just as, if not more interesting.
I have chosen this as an example because it links to many real life experiences for myself and most likely many others: such as turning on a sports channel to often see a men's sporting match in play or being advertised; people knowing more about men's sporting teams than womens; and making more of an effort to follow men's sports teams in various forms of competitions, the list goes on and on.
One statistic that proves this is that the men's football world cup final (2022 between Argentina and France) had around 20 million viewers in the UK compared to the women's (2023 between Spain and England) with a record of but only 12 million. Therefore proving my point, that although women's sport has come a long way in the past few decades, there is still much of the journey to go, and this can only start now with you, me, and the rest of us. So what is there to wait for?
I will ask you one question, if I may what famous sports person would you choose and why, whether anyone knew them or not?
Comments (3)
I agree with you because in this life we live in men always overshadow women because the think that women are just a helper i the home but the is something more to that women are just like men the can do what men can do maybe even better the should not just be treated as slaves in the house, leaving the aspect of sports women are not usually allowed to do anything the are just hidden that is not how this life should be they should be allowed to contest in different activities.
I think that women's sports were considered significantly less important than men's sports. Male athletes have much higher salaries than female players, who may be better in some categories and play a better game. Men don't respect women's sports in the same way that they don't respect women in general in real life.
How do you think we could improve the gender pay gap in the sports industry and in society as a whole? Do you think it's fair?
In my opinion we can improve the gender pay gap in the sports industry by doing more advertising about women’s sports. Advertising brings attention to that subject and also money to the women who are in the advertisements. Also making women’s sports as prominent as men’s sports would help too, they could make women’s football into more matches and games that are shown on the tv or in real life where tickets are bought like men’s football is. I believe the gender pay gap is totally unfair as both genders are doing the same job or playing the same sport but the men are getting paid a substantial amount more than the women are which is very unfair. Imagine there being two bosses (a man and a woman) in the exact same position working together to manage a facility, both carrying out the same tasks and same work hours, would the man still get paid more? Probably and if so this proves the point of the pay gap being unfair.
I completely agree. One of the main reasons that the sports pay gap exists is because of the number of tickets being sold and the number of people viewing the event online. If the advertising increases then more people will begin to watch, therefore increasing the sports channel and athletes profit. This would become a cycle and throughout time this pay gap would become non-existent if this advertising is successful.
I think that there should be a legislature that says that athletes should be paid according to their performance and not according to gender. Men are often paid more than women because there is the belief that men should be paid more to pay bills and cater for the family. But it has been proven that in some families, the mother is the breadwinner this means that women need to be paid the same as men especially in sports when some women perform better than men.
I agree because I asked 3 people in my household to name 3 famous sports people and they all named males. That shows that men are always in the spotlight for sports and women just have to follow and lead under their spotlight. Women are way to overshadowed they deserve a lot more recognition.
Equality!